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Student Success Plan

Institutions seek ways to help their students meet their goals and graduate on time. Students may face obstacles in their academic and personal lives which prevent them from meeting their goals. The Student Success Plan (SSP) helps students remove these obstacles, positively impacting student success. Through SSP, coaches, counselors, and advisors identify student challenges and match students with the resources they need to excel.

What is SSP?

The open source Student Success Plan (SSP) case management software supports a holistic coaching and counseling model which expedites proactive interventions for students in need. SSP is designed to improve retention, academic performance, persistence, graduation rates, and time to degree. Through counseling, web-based support systems, and proactive intervention techniques, students are identified, supported, and monitored. SSP can be used with any targeted population of students, such as at-risk students or athletes. SSP is a multi-tiered system, with strong security controls to allow many different college roles to work with the student, while maintaining student privacy. The software provides case management tools: My Academic Plan (MAP), MyGPS, Main dashboard, Action Plan, Journal, Early Alert, and Accommodation. Data is collected and analyzed to provide reports that allow decisions to be made about future efforts.

Please read about Unicon’s services for SSP, in the tabs below.

Associated Services for Student Success Plan (SSP)

Consulting Services for Student Success Plan (SSP)

Unicon's consulting services help in advising institutions and organizations on how to take full advantage of SSP to meet their business objectives. Unicon assigns an experienced Project Manager to oversee expert project teams as they work to deploy and support custom enterprise SSP instances that solve business challenges. Unicon’s experts can meet aggressive deadlines, even when integrating SSP with several different systems.

Evaluation

Whether an institution or organization is in the process of implementing, updating, or maintaining SSP, assessing and evaluating options can impact the success of SSP. Unicon understands the importance of documenting goals, needs, and wants, and offers an evaluation service to institutions.

This first-step service provides a snap-shot of where the institution is or to help clarify a need for SSP. An evaluation session can determine and prioritize the conditions and needs required for a new implementation, update, or customization to an existing SSP instance. Unicon’s evaluation service includes surveys, reporting, and analysis, all helping institutions decide their business needs. Unicon also provides best practices for evaluation based on functionality, finances, support/maintenance, performance, usability, and security.

Mentoring

General SSP mentorship affords institutions access to a Unicon developer/ consultant experienced in working with SSP. Consultants are made available to assist and mentor staff.

Types of mentoring activities include: answering questions, helping staff execute on development, providing guidance on configuration tasks, and performing research and producing documentation as requested up to the agreed amount of hours. Mentorship assists in knowledge transfer to grow an institution’s staff expertise in the development of the SSP framework and for maintaining the SSP instance

Customization Services for Student Success Plan (SSP)

SSP allows for customization to meet the growing and diverse needs of each institution. The SSP toolset can be customized to meet the clients’ needs. Clients can decide which tools to take advantage of, building out an SSP implementation that is designed to improve student success and retention. Unicon can extend SSP’s functionality through system integration.

Unicon offers software engineering expertise, to customize the flexible and extensible SSP framework. Unicon's software engineering teams ensure timely delivery of projects using agile and scrum development methodologies. Unicon has designed and implemented highly scalable and high performance architecture.

Systems Integration Services for Student Success Plan (SSP)

Unicon can modify the SSP code base and its toolsets and integrate SSP with other applications as needed by the institution. Unicon will work with clients to determine if any additional customizations or integration services are desired and estimate the level of effort (cost) required to develop and implement the solution(s).

SSP is built on flexible, open standards-based technologies, with enterprise-grade APIs that allow for simple integration with other systems and customization for specific local needs. SSP enables easy integration with student information systems (SIS), prepopulating SSP with student information to eliminate the need of manually entering each student record into the system. SIS information appears in the Main Dashboard of SSP with other student information. SSP can also be integrated with the institution’s learning management system, allowing faculty to send Early Alerts directly from inside the LMS.

Solution Delivery Services for Student Success Plan (SSP)

Since SSP is not an application, development effort is required to customize the framework. It takes skill and expertise to install the components in a well-defined, usable manner. Unicon has extensive experience deploying SSP. Unicon has developed best practices to help facilitate a successful, stable implementation for clients. Unicon’s expert Project Managers guide clients through each phase of implementation, from brainstorming and planning to maintenance and support. While each of these services may be purchased separately, investing in the full package is ideal to avoid common pitfalls and ensure a seamless execution.

A successful deployment depends on taking advantage of the complete set of services listed below.

Support for Open Source Student Success Plan (SSP)

Protect the investment in SSP and gain all of the advantages of this open source software designed specifically for institutions plus top-quality, professional support from a commercial vendor. Unicon’s Open Source Support program is SLA-driven and backed by an accountable team of open source experts. Take advantage of a flexible, customizable open source support service with direct access to dedicated developers, consultants, and system administrators each possessing deep experience within the select open source projects. Get the backing of technical expertise and professional service all at an affordable price.

Training Services for Student Success Plan (SSP)

One of the most attractive strengths of adopting open source software is the potential to become vendor independent. However, finding formalized training to educate application administrators and counselors on SSP's framework is a challenge. Unicon provides expert SSP training through seasoned instructors. They feature a blend of lecture and hands-on exercises to help technical teams achieve a comfort level with the SSP environment.

SSP Application Administrator Training

SSP End-User (Counselor) Training

End-User Training is an introduction to SSP and guide to using product features effectively through hands-on exercises, use-case examples, and related reference materials.

Other Services for Student Success Plan (SSP)

Hosting

Unicon can host an institution’s instance of SSP. Unicon’s hosting service is designed to maximize productivity, performance, and security, with a state-of-the-art data center and a team of experienced service delivery veterans.

Upgrades

As the open source community continues to make enhancements and adjustments to SSP, new versions are released. These upgrades can be difficult for institutions or organizations to complete without a strong commercial vendor. Unicon’s services offer an ease of migration to the newest release of SSP.

Prior to upgrade, Unicon recommends a thorough review of the client's environment, to determine the scope of the upgrade based on the extent of customization. Services can include integration of existing configuration and/or customizations in one or more client environments.

History of Student Success Plan (SSP)

SSP is mature technology that has been in use for 10 years. It has been recognized with 11 national awards, and the project has received grant funding, including the latest grant from NGLC.

SSP was developed by Sinclair Community College. Sinclair’s data indicates that students who are involved in SSP are more likely to return the next term; they are more likely to complete more courses successfully; they have higher GPAs and they are more likely to be enrolled two years later.

According to Sinclair statistics from 2005 – 2011, students using SSP were five times more likely to graduate. For quarter to quarter retention rates (Fall ’10 to Winter ’11), transitioned SSP students (students who have completed the SSP process) had a 37% higher rate of retention compared to students who qualified for the program but did not participate and a 26% higher rate of retention than students not designated “at risk”.